STERLING allen
OUR NEW ROOM
Publication Released December 2021
Sterling Allen’s project Our New Room is a series of temporary site-specific installations in unsanctioned spaces that address some of the issues inherent in thinking about objects, site, sculpture, and photography. Allen scouts locations of abandoned spaces and installs his own momentary exhibition, at times experienced only by himself. Allen’s documentation offers the viewer a glimpse into the lives of the objects he makes, collects, and remakes—and installs, deinstalls, and reinstalls. While not an artist book in the formal sense, the individual sculptures and their various groupings only exist through this photography, and are joined together only in this publication.
This body of work is presented alongside a feature essay by art historian Sarah Hamill, a sequence of poems by Christopher Rey Pérez, a short essay by Emily Lee, and an interview conducted by fellow artist Ian Pedigo.
What Sterling Allen’s body of work in Our New Room claims is that sculptural values of touch and tactility, site and space, body and surface, still matter as ways for us to come to terms with our experience of the world. Sculptural qualities are enacted and animated photographically, by setting up a scene chock full of texture and light, enticing our hand into the plane of the image, and slowing down our looking as we jump from page to page. Seen photographically, Allen’s sculptures––as itinerant, provisional, contingent things––are a metaphor for our own fragmentary and precarious condition…
—Sarah Hamill
Excerpt of "Precarious Things”
About the Artist
Sterling Allen holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. He is a co-founder and co-director of Okay Mountain, an artist collective and former gallery based in Austin, Texas. As a solo artist and in collaboration with the group, he has exhibited and completed projects at venues throughout the United States and received several residencies including the Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program in San Antonio, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor in Studio Art at Texas State University.
